July 27, 2008

I have to give the “Lost” creative team props for making the show’s Comic-Con experience into a hour of well-thought-out performance art. Not only were Cuse and Lindelof and their Box o’ Presents quite entertaining, all bells and whistles were a clever distraction from the fact that they gave up almost nothing about the upcoming season.

There were a few clues, and those sort-of newsy-ish items are listed below, followed by the details of the panel.

They seem to have nailed down how the next 34 hours of the show will play out: There will be two seasons of 17 episodes each, debuting in February 2009 and February 2010.

Daniel Faraday and his notebook full of information about past and future events figure prominently in the new season.

Both Jin and Locke will be back again this season. As Cuse said, “dead is a relative term” on the island. There are still lots of stories to tell about both characters, they said.

They wouldn’t call it a flashback per se (they’re trying to move away from that word), but they said that we’d see Danielle Rousseau’s “story” this season.

The Dharma Initiative recruiting materials (or something related to what was shown at Comic-Con) will go live at dharmawantsyou.com on Monday.

Matthew Fox turned up, and he didn’t say much but he handed out a “Lost” prize to one questioner who asked whether he’d end up with Kate (the producers didn’t really give an answer to that, not surprisingly).

Fans are apparently already calling Season 5 “the zombie season.”

All things considered, Lindelof and Cuse got mostly friendly questioning from the packed Comic-Con audience, aside from the guy who said they were “naughty” for misleading the audience into thinking a Sun-Jin episode in Season 4 was taking place in one timeline when actually it was taking place in two different timelines (my two cents: I think that that guy was completely right).

The running gag of the “Lost” session was that Lindelof and Cuse gave out appropriate “Lost-related” merchandise to each questioner. For example: Nobody asked if the humans left on the island were OK after Ben Linus appeared to move the entire thing in the show’s Season 4 finale. But the woman who asked if Vincent the dog had survived (the answer is yes) got a commemorative toy polar bear.

The guy who took them to task for the Jin-Sun episode got a “Heroes” DVD boxed set mistakenly left behind by the panel for that NBC show. “It’s a much better show,” Lindelof deadpanned.

During the session, there was also an extended Dharma Initiative gag designed to entertain the super-geeks that make up the Comic-Con crowd.

Early in their presentation, Cuse and Lindelof said that they’d decided to sell some product-placement slots to the Dharma Initiative (they both had giant cups with the logo of the group on the side). As part of the deal, they had to give the Dharma folks five minutes of their Comic-Con presentation, and Hans Von Egan, a man allegedly representing the Initiative, came to talk about the group’s recruiting plan.

On the main floor of convention, the Dharma Initiative had installed a booth which would ask those brave enough to step inside a series of questions. Von Egan shared video excerpts of what people in the booth answered to various questions (“Describe your first kiss in three words,” “Who is your constant?” “What would you sacrifice to stay alive?” “What does terror sound like?” “Why does the female black widow spider eat the male after mating?” “You just stole a sick child’s toy. Why?”)

There’s something inherently funny about a guy in a Stormtrooper costume giving an unintelligible answer to one of these wacky questions. We also got to see Lindelof in the booth, giving his answer about what he’d sacrifice to live: “Carlton Cuse.”

Even though it produced a highly amusing, well-edited highlight reel, Von Egan pronounced the results of Dharma’s Comic-Con recruiting efforts to be an almost complete failure. “Pathetic,” he said. “You boys and girls in a state of suspended adolescence – you sicken me.”

Still, he said he managed to find a few recruits, and brought them out
on the stage. Much later, one of the alleged Dharma recruits stormed
the stage, yelling about having to get the truth to the people. We then
saw an illicit video he’d been shown by the Dharma people. The video
starred of one of my favorite Dharma characters, Dr. Marvin Candle (who
goes by various names in the “Lost” universe).

In this video-within-a-skit or whatever it was, Dr. Candle revealed his
true name to be Dr. Pierre Chang, and he said he was professor and
scientist in Ann Arbor, Mich. He talked about the Dharma Initiative’s
“violent purge” and said the group needed to be reconstituted and its
“research” begun again (I almost expected Suresh from “Heroes” to pop
up at this point).

He was wearing a very ’70s sweater, and said he was speaking from 30
years in the past. Off-screen, a voice could be saying that making this
video was “useless”; the voice sure sounded a lot like that of Daniel
Faraday.

What does it all mean? Who knows. One thing is for sure: The “Lost”
team is very good at anticipating just what kind of Comic-Con
shenanigans will keep their fans happy.

Here are some of the questions from the fans, and my summaries of the
answers from Cuse and Lindelof. Where possible, I’ve listed what “Lost”
merchandise fans got for asking particular questions. And by the way, I
think what follows contains no real spoilers, but there are a couple
more clues about Season 5.

Fan question: When the hatch blew and the sky went purple in an earlier season, did the island move then?

Answer: No, but “something” did happen.

Fan question: What are their favorite episodes and seasons?

Lindelof: The Season 1 finale was his favorite episode (before the show
“degraded to utter despair,” he joked) and in terms of favorite
seasons, he mentioned both Seasons 1 and 4.

Cuse: “The Constant” was his favorite episode and Season 1 was his favorite season.

Fan question: Did the cityscape reflected below the characters in the “Lost” promotional photos for Season 4 mean anything?

Answer: Not really. They sort of alluded to the fact that some characters were out in the real world, not on the island.

Fan question: Do the other “Lost” writers know what happens at the end of the series? Do their families and mothers know?

Answer: “Talking about my mother in front of 6,500 people. It’s every
Jew’s dream,” Lindelof said. Families don’t know much, they implied,
but the others writers know enough to carry on should Lindelof and Cuse
be massacred by rabid polar bears.

“Lost” present: A life vest signed by the show’s writing staff.

Fan question: Will Kate see Sawyer again?

Answer: Yes.

“Lost” present: A poster signed by the cast.

Fan question: What happened to the Zodiac boat that was out in the water when the island disappeared?

Answer: If you’re worried about the five non-speaking extras that were
in the boat, stay worried. If you’re worried about Daniel Faraday,
don’t be; it sure sounds like he’ll be back on the show in Season 5.

“Lost” present: One of Faraday’s ties.

Fan question: When the show flashes forward or backward, will there be a limit to the time periods they’ll show?

Answer: They lost me on this one, no pun intended. I generally got the
gist that the time stuff will be more fluid (or as they say on “Doctor
Who,” there will be more “time-y wimey flippy floppy”). And we won’t
just see the Oceanic Six off the island. They also said that when
Season 5 begin, per tradition, “you won’t know where or when” it’s
taking place.

My favorite fan question: How old is Richard Alpert and how many toes does he have?

Answer: Cuse: “He is quite old.” We’ll learn “a lot more about Richard
Alpert’s history” in the upcoming season. As for the toe issue, “you’re
going to see him barefoot in the very near future, and that’s pun
intended – the very near future,” Lindelof said.

“Lost” present: A shirt that says, “I asked a Richard Alpert question and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

Comments

The reference to the Zombie Season is a running gag from The Official LOST Podcast that Damon and Carlton do. Season 7 is supposed to be the Zombie Season. They still joke about ways to deliver that zombie season despite the show ending in 6 seasons. It came up in the showrunners panel as well.

Man, I wish I had been at Comic Con... Just for the Lost panel alone! Cuse & Lindelof are always entertaining. I just can't believe we have to wait until freakin' February for the show to come back. Guess I'll have to check out the new Dharma website today. Sure beats doing work!

Oh, and for people who haven't seen Lost but would like to try it out... You're in luck! Apparently, Sci-Fi Channel will start showing reruns in four-hour blocks every Monday night starting in September. Also, channel G4 will be doing "Lost in 2.0" starting in September as well. It'll be every episode, in order, with added pop-up factoids and creator commentary on the screen. So there you go... It's a great time to "get Lost"!

Hi Mo-
As one of the Lost super-geeks who also loves your site, I thought I'd pass along a sheepish heads up on the "zombie season." The term doesn't refer to the upcoming season, it is an ongoing joke from the official podcast where Damon and Carlton would sometimes riff on plot points or stories that they plan(ned) to address in the seventh season of the show, which they dubbed the "zombie season".
The joke started before they had a definite end date for the series and was their way of signaling that they didn't want to drag the show out. Fans were sad to hear that the agreement with ABC would negate the zombie season and some of us hold out hope that we will get a single episode of brain eating goodness as an extra on the final DVD set.

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